Chekhov's Gun

If you don't know this one, you're obviously so divorced from knowing anything about writing that you just don't care, or you're ten years old. Most likely, you've heard it but you don't know the source, or you've misremembered it, so like the entire rest of the internet, we have to start by stating it. I'll use Goodreads as a source. Chekhov would have said it in Russian.

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there."

This is entirely true and also the cause of everything that's wrong with literary criticism today. The assumption is that Chekhov intended the gun to be a metaphor accentuating the necessity of narrative economy and the importance of relevance in storytelling. The argument goes that every "element" introduced in a story should serve a purpose... and that the gun is merely an example of one such element.

However, I don't think this is what Chekhov meant. A gun is not an ordinary, everyday sort of element. No one watching a play gives a rat shit if the blue curtains on the window flutter in act two. Guns are dangerous items that grab attention, that frighten, the express the immediate and potential death of one of the members of the play, not to mention the audience as well, whose animal brains cannot distinguish between the stage and the mezzanine. Chekhov was trying to say, I believe, since he never so far as I know ever used any other example other than "gun" to express this belief, while in fact expressing the gun metaphor often to many different persons via letters, was that a GUN cannot be ignored if you hang it on a wall. So if you're going to employ a GUN in a play, and put it where the audience can see it, then understand that they're not going to take their eyes off the gun until it's used.

There is no concrete evidence that Chekhov ever intended the "gun" in his famous adage to represent anything other than a literal, attention-grabbing object within the context of a narrative. The widespread assumption that it's a broader metaphor for "narrative economy" or "relevance" is based largely on modern literary interpretation and the tendency to generalise Chekhov's statement to encompass more abstract elements of storytelling.

I'll go one further and argue that Chekhov's direct advice to playwrights and storytellers often revolved around the practical aspects of crafting drama and tension, and the gun was a powerful symbol of that. The issue arises when readers simply won't accept the phrasing of the author, the narrator or the character in the story as defacto what the writer meant. No, according to literary criticism, which co-opts the above phrase without legitimacy and many other like phrases stated by other writers, everything in a piece of work must have some subtle, underlying, unstated subtext that says what it really means, even though this subtext can't be scripted, absolutely defined or even be proved to exist. Despite this, however, we have an entire industry of literary professors whose lives, incomes, homes and all other material wealth depends upon a significant percentage of the population buying into this horseshit.

But... do I, as a writer, incorporate subtext?  Yes, yes I do. Because we as human beings often do not say what we mean. My mother and your mother say, "I love you," but it's most unlikely that they are both thinking the same thing when they say it, or that it's coming from the same place. So, yes, agreed, I'm on board. Subtext exists.

Can subtext be used to further a story's narrative? Absolutely. I don't need to have ever heard of Chekhov or to ever have taken a course in literary criticism (though... *sigh*... I have) to know this. It becomes self-evident the more that a writer writes. Not just through the experience of a reader who grossly understands the plainspoken words on the page, which happens all the time ("the dog crossed the street;" how is that not clear?), but we see it in ourselves when we write something and then don't revisit it until two or three years in the future. In other words, we see subtext in things we wrote ourselves that we did not put there. We know we did not, because its very jarring when we see it.

We can take two meanings from this. The first, that the entire literary community accepts, is that human beings are secretly constructive beings that write things into stories subconsciously, meaning for those things to be there even when the author is not and may never be consciously aware of this. And the second, that human beings come to things they write with a bucket of shit they're more than ready to pour into the writer's soup. Even when the human being, now three years older, is not the one that wrote the text.

Both of these interpretations are based on psychology. The first is based on 19th century psychology, which ignores all the work that's exploded Freud's concept of the subconscious, while the other is based on present-day psychology, which argues that people are largely primed to believe what they want to believe. Guess which one universities continue to embrace.

When an academia becomes so rigid that it depends upon 19th century science to thrive, it's time to throw in the towel.

Unfortunately, present-day psychology doesn't leave literists anything to do. And so, because they like their yobs and their shit, they continue to preen their feathers in front of journalists who assume (journalism is also based on a 19th century belief system) that literists have something of value to say. Which is good, because heuristics don't play very well on Fox.

I get frustrated when I'm watching a film or a television show that produces a writer character, or a group of professors, who must somehow provide a coded indication of their intellectual prowess for an audience that is assumed to have none. Or worse, for an audience that has prowess in a very exclusive club of recognisable names. For example, if we are to present a literary female professor at a university played by a woman in her 40s, she will have exactly one author that she wishes to talk about. That author hasn't written a book in 200 years, and discusses concepts that haven't been relevant in at least a century (for those who can't get this sorted, "a hundred years ago" was not ten years before WW1, but in the middle of the Jazz Age), but no matter, we'll pound feminist subtext into the book nonetheless, because damn, they were meant to be there.

And if its a male professor over 60, he will have exactly one author that he loves — an author that groundbroke a distinctive literary style that failed him in his own time, never became popular, and is now the bane of writers who must abandon that style if they ever want someone to read them. I'm endlessly stunned that a total failure of a literist has become the immediate go-to example of the writer that no one else emulates, but we nevertheless must enshrine.

Sprinkle half a dozen authors in with these two and we have the entire lexicon of pre 1990 literature, so far as the media is concerned. You can mention a few pieces but please, don't mention the author. Oh, and if the book they read got made into a movie, well, we're bound to know ten times more about how much the author hated the movie than we know about the book... excepting those parts where the movie changed the book and now we all must know what was changed, without context.

Yet... YET... and this is the bloody point... omg, A.I. is destroying everything.

Yeah, I'm not going to pick that up. The literary comprehension of those who are barking about the problem is so scant, even if they have read the books (bucket of shit ready, pour), I can't see it makes a difference. The last ten people I've encountered who claim to have read Pride and Prejudice seem to fall into two categories. The first is that the book they've actually read was Sense and Sensibility, and second, they can't seem to remember anything that happened Elizabeth except her reading Darcy's letter. That seems to be it.

I asked A.I. about it and it confesses that A.I. isn't helping the inability of people to actually read, or even to remember the title of the book they claim to have read. I have to argue that it's not hurting, either. Throughout all of history, regardless of the number that actually can read, it's only ever been of relevance to a tiny portion of human beings that are alive. A "reader" is not one who aches for literary criticism, which is at best the arrangement of cigarettes that Pink creates on the floor of his hotel room in The Wall, nor one who cares who else reads the books they read. Such rarely suggest books. When I see someone in a chat room promote a book that is not their own, I assume they want the cred for "being someone who finds great books"... whereas I usually assume that if I really like a book, there's no point in telling someone else to read it because either they won't "get it," or they'll get it in entirely the wrong way. Either way, we'll have nothing to talk about with each other, so what's the point? Where a book is concerned, I feel there are only two people who matter: the author and me. Everyone else can go hang.

I love when people come and tell me they liked something I wrote. But unfortunately, they never say the stuff that really matters to me. No one ever says, "Jeez, when you used the word 'mezzanine' instead of 'audience,' I really got what you were going for there." Naw, they only say they liked it, and maybe they quibble about something, or admit I changed their mind about a thing... but you know, those things really aren't the writing part.

You know?